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In 2008, Holmes needed a tool to manage multiple social media networks at his digital services agency, Invoke Media.[9] Finding that there was no product in the market offering all the features he sought, Holmes, along with Dario Meli, David Tedman, and the Invoke team, chose instead to develop a platform of their own that would be able to organize their many social media accounts and networks.[10] The first iteration of this social media management system launched on November 28, 2008 in the form of a Twitter dashboard called BrightKit.[11]

Recognizing that many other individuals and organizations across the world were facing similar problems with managing multiple social accounts, Holmes decided that BrightKit could be the solution for other businesses also looking to organize their own social networks.[9] The launch of BrightKit met very positive reception, thanks to its clean interface and publishing capabilities.[12]

In February 2009, Holmes offered a $500 prize for renaming the platform, and used crowdsourced suggestions from the dashboard’s 100,000+ users as contest submissions.[13] The winning idea was Hootsuite, a moniker submitted by a user named Matt Nathan[14] and based upon "Owly", the dashboard’s owl logo, as a word play on the French expression "tout de suite", meaning "right now".

In November 2009, the Hootsuite dashboard expanded its offering to support Facebook and LinkedIn, and the capability to use Twitter Lists.[15]

In December 2009, Hootsuite spun off from Invoke Media and launched officially as an independent company, Hootsuite Media, Inc. That same month, Hootsuite received $1.9 million in funding from Hearst Interactive Media, Blumberg Capital, and prominent angel investors Leo Group LLC and Geoff Entress.[16]

In March 2012, OMERS Ventures, the venture capital investment arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, invested $20 million, valuing the company at US$200 million.[17][18] OMERS did not buy its stake directly in the company, but rather bought private shares in a secondary transaction from a handful of employees and early investors, said Holmes.[19]

In July 2012, an employee informed Forbes magazine that the company's team consisted of 200 employees at that time.[22]

In September 2012, Hootsuite acquired Seesmic, a customer relationship management system and competitor.

On August 1, 2013, the company announced that it had raised US$165 million in Series B funding from Insight Venture Partners, followed by Accel Partners and OMERS—all three will now have a seat on Hootsuite's board. Holmes also said the company was looking to make at least two unnamed acquisitions, in addition to employing 100 overseas employees.[20]

In February 2017, Hootsuite announced its acquisition of AdEspresso, a digital advertisement manager, and LiftMetrix, a leading social media analytics company.[23]

Hootsuite is competing in a marketplace for social media dashboard tools or platforms, where marketers are focused on social media management for their clients' web engagement activities. Hootsuite's best known competitors include Spredfast and Sprout Social.[35] Each of the big three dashboards pursues innovation strategies that emulate the most recent feature enhancements of the other two; for example, TweetDeck launched with a desktop application based on the Adobe AIR platform, and eventually Seesmic rolled out its own Desktop version.

Additional competition includes the social media and media monitoring niche, such as Mention, which offers real-time web and social media monitoring[36] in multiple languages,[37] and is designed to provide alerts on a desktop and smart devices.[38] Within financial services, companies like Gremln provide social media publishing tools that help companies meet strict compliance rules.

Other competition in this space includes platforms that appeal to niche segments, such as Octopusocial, which provides a social media marketing platform designed for B2Bsocial media[39] and content marketing. In the last year [2015] companies like Tiempy and Everypost raised from Latin America to compete in the same market, bringing easy to understand tools that non-expert users can utilize. CoSchedule is another online marketing calendar that allows users to easily schedule through social media in one simple step, keeping all social and content in one place providing a "unified workflow."[40]